“I don’t know the correct level of content moderation by Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Amazon. And neither do you.
Sometimes I can pinpoint what looks to me like an obvious misstep”
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“But I also know deciding what and whom to allow on your platform is a hard problem. Scale is hard”
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“The difficulty of this task hasn’t stopped everyone from elected politicians to think-tankers to pundits from looking for ways to punish tech companies for doing it wrong. These folks disagree about what is broken in the status quo, but the calls to action are no less strident for all that.
For every person arguing against moderation on the grounds of ideological bias, there is someone else pushing for more aggressive moderation to control rampant hate speech or “disinformation”—which can mean everything from objectively false claims to arguments that some users consider subjectively offensive. There are those who find the profit-making aspect of the whole industry distasteful, and there are those who fret about the difficulties faced by would-be competitors due to the sheer size of the companies in question.
The push to crack down on Big Tech is both bipartisan and fiercely politically tribal—the worst of both worlds.
The proposed solutions are numerous, and nearly all involve aggressive government action: break up some or all Big Tech firms via antitrust, remove longstanding liability protections by rewriting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, treat social media platforms as public utilities or common carriers with all the constraints that entails, reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, and much more.”
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“Any legislative or regulatory restriction on Big Tech will not be a triumph of the oppressed over the powerful. It will be yet another instance of the already powerful wielding the state’s machinery to compel private companies to do what they want, likely at the expense of their market competitors or political enemies. Such reforms are far more likely to be censorship than to reduce censorship, in the strictest sense.
It has become fashionable on both the left and the right to argue that Big Tech is now more powerful than a government or perhaps indistinguishable from one. Here is a list of things governments sometimes do if they dislike what you say or how you say it: lock you up, take your property, take your children, send you to die in a war. Here is a list of things tech companies sometimes do: delete your account.
Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Google do play a huge role in many people’s lives. To be kicked off a popular platform can be deeply unpleasant and unnerving. But the notion that political interference will result in broader access to a better product is naive at best and dangerous at worst.
On platforms that do any moderation or curation at all—both functions that are necessary for a pleasant or even comprehensible user experience—there are going to be many thousands of borderline calls each day, by humans and robots alike. And those decisions get more plentiful and complex over time. That, in turn, generates more room for error, and more consumer demand for clarity.”
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“Every single one of these sites is entirely or primarily free to use. Yes, they make money, sometimes lots of it. But the people who are absolutely furious about the service they are receiving are, by any definition, getting much more than they paid for. The results of a laissez-faire regime on the internet have been remarkable, a flowering of innovation and bountiful consumer surplus.
The question of the correct level of content moderation by Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and their would-be rivals is not a question that needs to be answered in the sphere of politics. We do not need to agree on a single answer. Which is good, because we never will.”
“DeSantis pushed the ‘anti-riot” bill in the aftermath of last year’s racial justice protests that spread across the nation — and even cited protesters blocking roads as a justification for the measure that includes extra penalties for people accused of participating in riots and violent protests.
But Democrats and other critics of the law — which is being challenged in federal court — accused DeSantis and other Republicans of supporting selective enforcement of the measure. They said the measure was designed to target Black protesters upset with police shootings. But now DeSantis and other GOP leaders are in a difficult position since they support the aims of many of the demonstrators backing Cuba in Miami and elsewhere.
This week, demonstrators blocked major roadways for hours in Miami-Dade County without any reports of arrests or citations. But the Tampa Bay Times reported on Wednesday that two demonstrators in Tampa were held in jail overnight without bail because of a provision in the new law.
On Tuesday, DeSantis sidestepped a question about whether authorities should arrest people blocking roads as part of protests in solidarity with Cuba. Those demonstrations popped up in several cities as Cuban Americans voice their support to Cuban protesters who are demanding an end to the authoritarian regime that has controlled the island nation for the past six decades.
On Thursday, the governor reversed course and said that authorities could not “tolerate” people blocking roads.
“It’s dangerous for you to be shutting down a thoroughfare,” DeSantis said during a press conference with Florida GOP Reps. María Salazar and Carlos Giménez calling on the Biden administration to help restore Internet access to Cuba. “You’re also putting other people in jeopardy. You don’t know if an emergency vehicle needs to get somewhere and then obviously it’s just disrespectful to make people stand in traffic.”
DeSantis repeated his assertion that his ‘anti-riot’ bill was meant to crackdown on violent protesters.”
“One test is unfolding in Nevada in a fight over a planned lithium mine and a rare desert wildflower. A mining company, ioneer Ltd., has proposed building a large-scale lithium-boron mine in western Nevada (the first of its kind in the United States) to supply materials for electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, and other clean-energy technologies. If approved, the mine could quadruple domestic lithium production and help build 400,000 electric cars each year, according to the company’s estimates, helping to advance Biden’s goal “to win the EV market.”
But a rare plant may stop the project from breaking ground. The site is also home to Tiehm’s buckwheat, a pale yellow wildflower that is only found on a 10-acre patch of lithium-rich soil within the project area. Last year, the Center for Biological Diversity, a litigious environmental group, sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, demanding emergency protections for the buckwheat to block the mine. On Thursday, in response to a court order, the service proposed listing the buckwheat under the Endangered Species Act. The Biden administration now has until September 30 to issue a proposed rule to protect the plant, which could all but doom the lithium mine.
It’s a familiar story: A tangled web of environmental laws and regulations gives litigious groups ample opportunities to stall development projects or thwart them altogether. That strategy works well when environmentalists’ goal is to stop things from happening, but it’s likely to be a major obstacle to building the infrastructure and technological capacity to achieve Biden’s clean-energy vision, which will require many new mining operations, solar and wind farms, transmission lines, and other forms of development.”
“Throughout the pandemic, the median view of good housing policy—supported by landlord associations, tenant advocates, and policy wonks of all ideological stripes—has been to have the federal government fund rent relief. That way, the providers of rental housing can pay their bills, and financially pressed renters aren’t forced onto the streets or into more crowded living situations.
Despite these funds being appropriated for rent relief programs, actually getting money to people continues to be a major challenge.”
“Nicole Harper, pregnant with her daughter, was driving her SUV home on a Arkansas freeway in July 2020 when Arkansas State trooper Rodney Dunn decided to stop her for allegedly driving 84 in a 70 mph zone. He turned on his lights in an attempt to make her pull over.
Following what she understood to be standard safe procedure in this situation, Harper moved into the right lane, slowed down, turned on her hazards to indicate to the officer that she understood what was going on, and was seeking a safe shoulder or exit to pull over.
No sane person could have imagined, given Harper’s behavior, that she was involved in any active attempt to escape the raw justice of a speeding ticket. Fewer than two or three minutes had passed since the cop first turned on his lights.
Corporal Dunn was having none of that. Using an insanely dangerous strategy that police in Arkansas are using more and more—144 times last year, double the number of times the year before—he slammed into her SUV causing her to hit the concrete median, flipping her SUV. The practice, called the “precision immobilization technique” (PIT), killed at least three people in 2020.”
“The Court’s ruling is a crash course in the lopsided logic behind qualified immunity, which requires that the facts of any given case be reflected almost identically in a previous case should a victim of government abuse want the privilege of bringing their suit before a jury.”